


Life After Life

by IRL_Nagito



Series: come and kiss me with a smile [1]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: (for the first bit at least), Angst, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Ghost Komaeda Nagito, Ghostmaeda learning how to be a ghost, He ends up pining after Hajime like a dumbass, Hinata Hajime Has a Talent, Hurt/Comfort, It starts out horrible and then gets a lot better trust me, M/M, Sad and Happy, Sad with a Happy Ending, Sort Of, Suffering Komaeda Nagito, Ultimate Lucky Student Hinata Hajime
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:08:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29118744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IRL_Nagito/pseuds/IRL_Nagito
Summary: Nagito Komaeda’s death was once widely regarded as a tragedy.Then he was infamous as the broken ghost in the stairwell and as an empty seat that no one was allowed to sit in.Now he’s Hajime Hinata’s lovely ghost, even though old myths linger.Funny how things change.
Relationships: eventual Hinata Hajime/Komaeda Nagito - Relationship
Series: come and kiss me with a smile [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2136504
Comments: 7
Kudos: 110





	1. exsanguinate

**Author's Note:**

> Chapters are gonna be TINY because I suck at multichapter fics but I figured this was the best way to organize this little fic y’know??

Time didn’t slow down like some people would think. In fact, it went rather fast. A brief flash, like a firework bursting into a still night’s sky, blinding and marvelous in the way that something dangerous is.

All Nagito knew was that suddenly there was no ground, and all sense of up and down and left and right was lost to him, hanging for a moment like a marionette on its final string only to see the ground rushing at him. He tried to throw his hands out to catch himself, books and pencils thumping and clattering on the stairs of the Hope’s Peak dormitory as he let go of them, and then, with a snap, suddenly he was on his stomach, wide eyes fixed on the corridor that he shouldn’t have been able to see. 

His neck shouldn’t have been able to turn that far. 

Oddly enough, it didn’t hurt, even as he felt the collar of his pristine white shirt and favorite sweater vest get hot and damp with something thick- blood, it was blood, the red that was creeping into the edges of his vision- that smelled of copper and plasma. 

Soon enough his vision spotted, the world shimmering in front of his eyes like a mirage, bursts of white flecks and a black vignette muting the colors of the hallway.

Then, all at once, like a television being unplugged, everything went dark, and the screen was bashed in with something blunt that rung and shattered.

No sight, no sound, only the feeling of a broken body floating in limbo. And even then, he didn’t know if he had a body, or if he was even thinking. 

Nagito had never concerned himself with what was after death. He came to terms with his inevitable demise a long time ago, even if this wasn’t how he had expected to meet it. But now, suspended in nothingness that was too bright and too dark and too loud and too quiet all at once, he found himself wondering if this was the end.

It was fitting, he thought, ending up in a purgatory like this. Left with only half-formed thoughts and not a single anchor to the ground. 

Nagito mourned for a moment his sudden death, if that’s what this really was, dwelling on the what-ifs and should-haves, the many paths that his life could have taken. 

If only, if only, if only.

But it wasn’t over.

It encroached on him with the stealth of a tom, colors fading into the world, striped like a tabby pelt, blurred and soft until suddenly it was snapped into focus.

It felt like hours had passed, but it must have only been half an hour, maybe not even that.

His own body- his own corpse- lay sprawled on the floor at the bottom of the stairwell. His neck was turned unnaturally, skin ripped and torn and glassy eyes staring at that same hall that he shouldn’t have been able to see. 

Officers were skulking about the scene of it, likely to ward off any curious students, and Nagito watched as the coroners arrived and took the cadaver that once was him into a bag, his own eerily empty body staring back with a wry smile frozen on his white lips. 

His blood was cleaned up, and his belongings gathered, and his dormitory emptied, and Nagito could only watch as his life was slowly disassembled and buried before his eyes, as if he had never existed. 

As if Nagito Komaeda had never attended Hope’s Peak Academy- his idol, his temple, his love, his hope- in the first place.


	2. touch

It was surprisingly easy to become adjusted to being dead. 

No one sees you, no one hears you, no one knows that you ever existed. Nagito was a remnant of an empty man, whose name only existed in the living world on a tombstone and a few articles here and there from both long before and immediately after his death.

People didn’t know him as an eccentric, distant man with an inferiority complex and a turbulent cycle of luck anymore, but an unfortunate corpse, a piece of that past. He was a story whispered among students with pitying voices by students who avoided the now “cursed” stairwell, for fear of meeting the same fate.

But it wasn’t so bad.

Nagito felt like this was how it should have been in the first place as he sat- unseen, unheard, unknown- in the back of his former classroom, in his former seat, watching unfamiliar students, who were once his underclassmen, go through familiar motions. 

Chisa looked tired, a little haggard, still shaken from the sudden, tragic loss of a student. It had been a couple years now, and his class had graduated last year, but she seemed stuck on it. Nagito couldn’t understand why, but he felt both touched and hurt by it nonetheless. 

It was nice to know that someone cared enough to feel grief for him, but it saddened him to see just how much it hurt her to feel it.

He wished he could give her something, just so that she knows he’s okay and would stop blaming herself and grieving for a death that wasn’t her fault, that she couldn’t have prevented.

His desk had been left empty, perhaps in honor of him or perhaps a coincidence. If he peered down into the compartment beneath the desk, he could see things shoved in the back here and there that were once his. A pen he used to click whenever his hands wanted to shake, a pencil whose eraser bore teeth-marks here and there from where he would nibble when he concentrated, and a dried-out four-leaf clover that he had plucked from beside the sidewalk one morning on his way to class.

Nagito reached in with a deathly pale hand, knuckles slipping through the surface of the desk where they used to drag, and tried to curl his fingers around his pen. It was silver, engraved with his family name, an heirloom of sorts, and it was pretty miraculous that it hadn’t yet been stolen. But perhaps it was that no one wanted to touch the desk of a dead man.

He tried again to grab it, and again, and again, until suddenly his fingers felt warm and the clip of the pen clinked against the metal of the desk as it rolled towards him. It wasn’t very loud, with the murmur of the students around him and the steady voice of Chisa over them, but to Nagito he may as well have moved a mountain.

The first contact he had with the world of the living since his passing was a small, fleeting thing, but it gave him hope that he could do  _ more. _

He tried again, and managed to pull the pen towards him.

Again, and he was able to pick it up for a moment.

Again, and he held it in his palm for a few moments before it dropped, slipping through his hand like water.

The clang that time was enough to draw the attention of the Ultimates whose desks were closest, and they looked uneasy, but he didn’t mind. After all, what was a dead man to a god? Surely nothing. They had no need to fear him, and they would learn that as they truly came into their talents.

____________   
  


Later that day, after class, Chisa Yukizome cried after finding a dried clover and the pen of the student she couldn’t save, two things that couldn’t have possibly been put there by anyone else because no one other than her had ever dared touch that desk again. Beside them, a scrap of paper with a single word printed in a messy but familiar scrawl.

“大丈夫”.


	3. breathe

Nagito’s attempt to cheer up his teacher took so much out of him that he blacked out for the first time since his death. It was that same limbo from before, an emptiness that felt like what the inside of his own head used to sound like, and, when he finally came to, he was standing in the spot where he died, and he didn’t feel so faint anymore.

The best he could equate it to was a good night’s sleep, not that he had gotten one of those in years even before he died. At the very least, he now knew that he could sleep, and that he likely wasn’t at risk of nightmares when he did.

With a humming sigh, Nagito closed his eyes and tried to focus that warm feeling from before on the whole of his body. 

He wanted to feel the solid ground beneath his feet, the air ruffling his hair and chilling his ears and nose, smell the familiar, surprisingly clean lavender-ish scent of the main course’s halls, because of course Hope’s Peak would stand for nothing less than a pristine and perfect environment.

It flooded him all at once, almost overwhelming, and he shakily took in a breath only to find that he couldn’t, and there was a bubbling sound above and behind him. Brows furrowed, he opened his eyes and found an Ultimate— ah, Nagito recognized this one. The Ultimate Artist of class 74, wasn’t it?— staring at him with his eyes wide, a thick sketchbook, one with pages in all sorts of colors messily sticking out, clutched white-knuckled to his chest.

And then Nagito noticed that the ground was above him, and the shock of realizing where his head was snapped him back into incorporeality.

The living boy had turned tail by then, panicked breaths and harried footsteps echoing in the silence of the corridor, and Nagito was left alone again, invisible, facing the opposite direction with his back to the retreating student.

____________

Nagito tried again later that night, hiding away in one of the empty dorm rooms. 

He was looking in one direction, and then he was warm, and suddenly it was the opposite, with the floor above his hair and the ceiling below his chin. The phantom sensation of blood trickling down his neck made him shudder.

Nagito reached behind him over his shoulders and took his head in his hands, lifting it up to sit correctly on his splintered neck, and he was surprised to see his reflection in the mirror. 

He would catch sight of his reflection sometimes, flickering in and out like the dying fluorescents in the reserve course building, but there he looked like a blurry watercolor painting, only the faintest suggestion of a figure where he could only identify unruly wisps of white hair and the dark haze of his eyes.

Here, Nagito looked alive. The blood on his clothing drew back into the gash his cartilage had ripped in his throat, the skin seeming to simply seal back together behind it. He looked just like he had the morning of the incident, even down to the way he had forgotten to button the collar of his white dress shirt in his haste.

For the first time in the entire span of Nagito’s miserable existence, the sight of himself made him smile.


	4. Unclipped

Next he learned how to fly, though it hadn’t been on purpose, and it wasn’t exactly flying either.

It was more that he was weightless, untethered to the earth, his frail bones like that of a bird, hollow, and filled with helium, allowing him to go up and up and up.

Nagito discovered that through simply being startled. A door in the hallway slammed open and through him in the process where he idled half-aware beside a wall, and he jumped and curled into himself at the loud sound on instinct. When he finally peered over his knees, he found the ground was a ways below him, and, to be honest, he wasn’t that surprised. 

(Until he let out a very undignified squeak when he fell back to the floor.)

After all, what was the weight of a soul in a world that forgot it?

At least, he reasoned, he would never have to walk down the stairs again. 

That was fine with him. The irrational fear that welled up in him every time he walked down them was unpleasant, to say the least.

He tried to test it later, jumping up and down in that empty dorm room, an empty burning sensation in his cheeks every time he failed that would have been an embarrassed blush if he was alive. 

Nagito was very grateful at that moment that no one was there and able to see him, otherwise he would probably die twice over from the shame.

Eventually, he achieved that weightless feeling, and he was floating in the middle of the room, spinning slowly, his pinwheeling arms doing not much to stop him from turning upside down in the air. He blinked at the floor over his head, and sighed silently, a rise and fall of his chest rather than an actual breath, and then yelped when he promptly fell on his face.

This was going to take some getting used to.

So of course, he decided the best way to learn how to do things was to jump right in, literally.

Which is how he found himself jumping off the roof of the Main Course building.

In his mind, he knew that it could not possibly hurt him. He was already dead, after all. The worst that would happen is that he would sink into the earth a little.

(He still wasn’t sure what kept him from phasing through the earth. Nagito wasn’t sure he would ever really get an answer.)

In his heart, however, fear coursed through him like an electric current, making his stomach turn and his veins become leaden inside of him. He could use that to his advantage. His form knew what to do to attempt to save him, even if he himself didn’t.

Nagito froze well before he reached the ground, and he hung in the air like that for a moment, eyes screwed shut, until he dared to open them upon not feeling the expected elastic sensation of his feet sinking into the earth and springing back to the surface.

He steeled himself, and took a step. It felt vaguely like pushing off the side of a pool, propelling him forward. 

Nagito coasted around for a while, enjoying the sight of the campus from above, before pausing as he realized he wasn’t quite sure how to get down without simply plummeting.


End file.
